Slow Motion

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Published September 28, 2026

Slow Motion, also known as "slowmo," is a video-editing technique that stretches recorded footage across additional frames so time appears to crawl on playback1. Invented by an Austrian priest in 1904 and popularized on YouTube by channels like The Slowmo Guys, it became a go-to format for popping water balloons, high-frame-rate gunfire clips, and the iPhone 5S bounce videos that took over Reddit in 20132.

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Overview

Slow motion clips online tend to fall into a few recognizable buckets: destructive impacts like balloons bursting or watermelons exploding, high-speed weapons and projectiles, and animals or humans filmed at hundreds or thousands of frames per second1. The footage is captured with a high frame rate camera (or, from 2013 onward, generated by software interpolation) and played back at 24 or 30 fps, which stretches a fraction of a second into many seconds of screen time3.

The format took off online because ordinary events look completely different when slowed down. A face reacting to a soccer ball, water droplets hanging in the air, or a bullet exiting a barrel all read as small science experiments the eye normally cannot see4. Channels like The Slowmo Guys built entire careers around this reveal, and Reddit communities like /r/SlowMotion built around collecting the best clips8.

By 2013 the technique moved from specialist gear into the average phone. YouTube added a native slowmo enhancement to its editor3, and Apple shipped a 120 fps slow-mo mode on the iPhone 5S, which put the format directly in users' pockets and immediately produced a wave of viral clips2.

Origin & Background

Platform
Cinema (invention) / YouTube (viral spread)
Creator
August Musger
Date
1904

The technique itself was invented by August Musger, an Austrian Catholic priest and physicist who modified a film projector with a mirrored drum to slow the projected image5. He filed his patent in 1904 and demonstrated the device publicly for the first time in 1907 at a cinema in Graz, Styria5. Filmmakers later achieved the same look with a camera trick called "overcranking," running the camera at a high frame rate and playing footage back at standard speed1.

The web's earliest dedicated hub for slow motion clips, Ultraslo, went online on October 14th, 2005, offering a library of high-frame-rate videos long before YouTube supported the format natively4. That site laid the groundwork for slow motion's YouTube era, which arrived with Colin Colenso's May 30th, 2006 billiard-ball video6.

How It Spread

The YouTube breakout came on May 30th, 2006, when Colin Colenso uploaded a clip of billiard balls colliding in slow motion, a video that pulled more than 5.52 million views over the following seven years6. Less than a year later, on March 31st, 2007, the Ultraslo YouTube channel posted footage of a firearm being discharged at a very high frame rate, which passed 7.28 million views7. The /r/SlowMotion subreddit was created on March 14th, 2009, giving fans a central place to share new finds8.

The GIF era pushed the format further into general internet culture. On November 2nd, 2012, Redditor EABACA posted a Luger pistol firing GIF to /r/guns, which cleared 5,600 upvotes before being archived11. About six weeks later on December 18th, Redditor Weldz submitted a missile-launch GIF to /r/woahdude that took over 5,800 upvotes across the next five months10. In the same window, The Slowmo Guys, launched August 15th, 2010, hit roughly 219 million views and 2 million subscribers by May 2013, driven by hits like a giant water balloon bursting and a soccer ball to the face7.

Two events in 2013 opened the format to everyone. On May 28th, YouTube added a slow motion enhancement to its editor, letting any uploader slow a video down to 1/8 speed without high-speed camera hardware3. Then on September 20th, Apple released the iPhone 5S with a 720p 120 fps slow-mo mode built into the iSight camera2. Two days after launch, Redditor HoboStabz posted a clip titled "Testing out the new iPhone slow-mo camera on my girlfriend boobs," which cleared 567,000 views and 2,300 comments in 24 hours and spawned the /r/SloMoBoobs subreddit9.

Frequently Asked Questions